General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google

by Hiroki Azuma, John Person (Translator)

Stay informed. Talk about the issues. Always be engaged. Liberal societies have encouraged their members to take part—or at least interest—in politics. Yet, even in developed nations where it is said to work, the democratic process as we know it routinely fails to give voice, on the one hand, and to appeal at all, on the other hand, to a good number of citizens.


Whatever countervailing hopes the worldwide web gave rise to in its dawning years, far from restoring the “public sphere” of yore, the internet has completed its fragmentation. According to Japanese thinker Hiroki Azuma, the way forward must be sought through what network technology is actually good at: aggregating and processing the traces we leave (without always meaning to) every time we wade into the world of connectivity. 

Harking back to Rousseau and his idea of the general will, dropping by Freud and his discovery of the unconscious, taking inspiration from Google and the tenor of its innovations, revisiting Christopher Alexander and his highway planning, and making curious bedfellows of Twitter, Rorty, and Nozick, General Will 2.0 is a wild ride bound to delight not just citizens who “care” but those who find doing so to be increasingly difficult and false.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2013

About the author

東浩紀 in Japanese.
An influential Japanese literary critic and philosopher.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

160103: interesting perspective*, from japan around 2010, after the fukushima reactor tsunami disaster. this is a series of linked essays written about politics in the age of the internet/social media/conspiracy websites and how democracy may become something different and new and responsive to this 'general will', from deliberative, communicative, practical government to something expressive of unconscious of society... he ranges through various names as noted, potted summations of locke, hume, rousseau... to more contemporary names such as rorty and nozick, trying to pull his prescriptive dream into better focus...

not exactly political philosophy, not an academic treatise, it is interesting to see theory and polemic and hope from this other culture, and while his utopia(s) seem unfortunately thin and does not engage with the fury of emotions and xenophobia over rational and compassionate relationships of all humans, while he no less than us as postmodern westerners, as developed world, possibly underestimates the power and virulence and violence of certain other ways of living, of terrorism, of religious fanaticism, of racism... this is a notable, thought-provoking slice of japan...

*perspective now in USA: ... and is this applicable to the rise of Donald Trump? is he a true expression of the 'general will'? news at eleven...

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to know how to rate this one. Azuma is a perennially interesting thinker, but not a particularly deep one. He tends to approach Western thought as a grand buffet from which he picks and chooses at will, heedless of how flavors, ingredients, and textures might clash. Since he only nibbles, it probably doesn't matter. Azuma is writing here more as a public thinker, so I'm willing to cut him some slack for superficiality; this isn't a scholarly performance, but a journalistic one. A provocative, but not transformative, book.

[jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

oh, azuma, my darling. translation is so unfair. you are a joy as always in this but you knew it would be dated as you wrote it and now it is. the techno-optimism is self-aware. other parts are prescient.
it is a brilliant first swing, propulsive and sure of its need to exist. it is we who have failed it, returning to the very same democracy-authoritarianism myths. maybe we have in fact earned the schmittian 2020s.